Excerpt from Notes on Reinforced Brickwork, Vol. 1

Reinforced brickwork construction is in all essential features practically the same as reinforced concrete construction save that brickwork in cement mortar is substituted for cement concrete. The principles of reinforcement are similar and steel is used in various ways where necessary, as in reinforced concrete, to give the requisite strength to the material.

Structures Of all descriptions have now for many years been built in rein forced concrete. This form of construction has long passed the experimental stage and at the present time there is scarcely any project which has to be tackled by civil engineers for which it cannot be usefully and economically employed in some way. In India, however, it has not been as extensively used as elsewhere and the reasons for this are not far to seek. In India the price of cement is high as compared with what it is in other countries and the price of bricks, tiles, etc., low, so that in the past it has almost invariably been found when designing, that some other form Of construction was cheaper, to all intents and purposes as good, and had the further advantage Of being comparatively simple and therefore more easily and cheaply supervised. Another very great obstacle to the substitution of reinforced concrete for other forms of construction in India is undoubtedly the fact that the Indian mason (mistri) and labourer (coolie).cannot be trusted to do good concrete work, unless constantly supervised by an efficient staff, and to arrange for this, more especially in out-of-the-way places-is not always feasible. Every one who has experience of reinforced concrete construction in this country knows the great difficulty there always is in getting the labour to understand and put into practice the most elementary principles of good concrete work, not to mention the various troubles connected with the construction of centering and the correct placing of the reinforcement, no matter what detailed drawings may be provided. In rein forced brickwork construction all these difficulties very largely disappear and it will be found almost invariably that the cost of this form of construction is much lower than that of any other form of construction of a more or less permanent nature.

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